


though i'm dying to

by lamphouse



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Episode Tag, Episode: s13e03 Time's Up for the Gang, Gen, M/M, Season/Series 13, difficult conversations, just to be clear, no kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-18 06:44:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16112996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lamphouse/pseuds/lamphouse
Summary: All the best conversations happen drunk in a Marriott parking lot at ten o'clock at night.





	though i'm dying to

**Author's Note:**

> more in the end note, but the working title ("hello, you're on garbage boy car talk") says it all: nothing explicit! but follows conversation from the episode

"You know that's not why I kiss you, right?"

Dennis barely hears it over the _thunk_ of the door behind him, rubber muffling metal. It's a sound he's heard thousands of times, and that alone makes it more coherent than anything Mac could be doing right now.

"What?"

 _Stall for time._  Dennis unfixes his gaze out the window as he rewinds the "conversation" so far. The hotel parking lot is dark after hours whiled away slamming margaritas at the pool before being told to leave. Distantly, he hears Dee's car pulling out next to them, but even that doesn't disrupt the stifling stillness. The shitty car Frank bought him smells like a low-grade dry cleaner's and Dennis would roll down the window, but the pressure of the air outside is too great as he waits for Mac to continue.

"It's not—"

Unsettlingly, the Mac train grinds to a halt. No outburst, no sharp hand gestures, no easy shift into yelling. He sounds... small, _normal_. Not even Mac normal; he's frustrated, sure, but then he deflates, shoulders turned in, shaking his head at his own knees. If it were anyone else, Dennis would say he looks almost demure. It's uncanny—like someone else is wearing Mac's skin.

"Never mind," Mac finishes, pushing a hand through his drying hair. "Let's just go home."

Dennis reaches on autopilot to turn the key and do just that, and it almost ends there, but that familiar rage starts pushing up in his throat. He tries to hold it back, for once, tries again to rein it in. He's too tired to do this tonight, but that muscle is gone, and it all comes spilling out even as he refuses to look Mac in the eye.

"No, you know what?" He snaps at the windshield. "Please, Mac, tell me, what exactly is your rationale? How is you constantly hitting on me not harassment?"

"You have got to be kidding me." Mac rolls his eyes with his whole head, dramatic enough that Dennis can see it out of the corner of his eye.

He's almost, _almost_ back to being Mac again. Just one push and he'll snap and they'll miraculously be back on stable ground. Dennis pushes—it's all he knows how to do—and he's still coiled for a familiar fight when Mac just... _sighs_.

"What?" Dennis turns now, finally looking Mac in the eye. Mac still looks angry, angrier now that Dennis is glaring at him, and Dennis feels his finger on the button. "C'mon, Mac. What excuse do you have left?"

"You know, you're not so great yourself," Mac says, pointing, like it's not an obvious deflection. "All the creepy shit you do to women? Fucking—manufacturing receipts and that freaky goddamn alarm clock?"

"You keep kissing me!" Part of him clings to the idea that he's still just yelling to goad Mac, but that part of him is very small. "You're constantly all up in my business trying to bang me or whatever, dude."

"I..."

"What?!" Dennis snaps again. Mac is about to swallow the end of his sentence but as he takes a deep breath his eyes go angry, exactly the way Dennis was hoping they would.

"Yeah!" It's probably just the fact that they're in close quarters, but Mac's intensity fills the car. His hands spread wide, almost defensively, as he stares back at Dennis. "Sure, alright? But it's not—"

And this time he _does_ stop. His hands snap back into fists, falling onto his lap, and Dennis stays glaring at him like it's the only thing left in his arsenal.

"Say it."

 _Almost there_.

The thought follows immediately, but Dennis doesn't have time to question what it means, or why he had it, before Mac answers him.

"I don't wanna bang you because you're _hot_ , Dennis," Mac says his name with the pissed off edge that only Mac can make sound alright. "I wanna bang you because I'm _in love with you_ , man."

There.

Mac doesn't even have the decency to be worked up about it, just drops it, like it's nothing, like it hasn't been the unspoken foundation of their relationship for thirty years. In fact, he's still talking, moving forward like the world hasn't stopped under their feet.

"I mean, I know I have a weird relationship with sex, dude, but you're way worse, the way you literally objectif—"

"Oh my god, shut _up_." It's a reflex without conscious thought, but the anger of it is real, and it lets Dennis finally snap his eyes away from Mac.

Miraculously, Mac does exactly that, though the silence isn't that much better. It just gives Dennis room to think, and thinking is the last thing he wants to do right now, so he goes with his standby response and detaches from the situation entirely.

In the distance, horns echo off the freeway. Lights flash in and out between tree branches. The air is humid and still, and Dennis's hands are still on the steering wheel.

When Dennis returns, Mac is already looking back at him. Funny how that keeps happening.

"I honestly thought you knew," Mac says quietly, still not looking away.

He did, maybe, a little. In the back of his mind, in a box buried under about forty pounds of trash, Dennis knew. He knew all those times when Mac kissed him, when the ambivalent feeling of right-and-wrongness kept following Dennis even as he stepped away and refused to look at Mac's face. He knew when Mac turned a corner in their apartment and was always surprised to see him there again, when Dennis felt a tiny bit guilty and a tiny bit thrilled. He knew when they were dying on that fucking boat and Mac was planning dinner parties at "their" house, when they were at their actual house and every room was so spread out and all Dennis wanted to do every night was go lie down next to Mac, just for a minute, just to know the rooms weren't so empty. He knew, more, in North Dakota, how that emptiness feels. He knew before he left, and he almost said it, once or twice.

So that, at least, made sense on its own. What didn't make sense—or maybe just what he didn't want to acknowledge—was what Mac was talking about.

"I don't..."

Because there were lines, and there were reasons for those lines. Feelings stayed here, with movie night and monthly dinner and blood brotherhood, and sex was way over there, with increasingly complex and sketchy ways of reeling in anonymous women. There are sides, and as long as everything stays on its side, everything was fine. Trying to combine sex and rom— _feelings_ was just asking for disaster. Mac knew that.

 _He's already asking for disaster_ , that subconscious voice pipes up again. _He's asking for you._

Dennis clears his throat to cut off that thought before it can get anything farther and looks at the window, his own hands on the wheel, anywhere but Mac. "I didn't."

"Dude," Mac scoffs, quiet and fond, "I got you an RPG."

"Yeah, but—"

"For _Valentine's Day_." It's almost a question, but a gentle one. It makes his skin itch.

Dennis takes a breath that is ragged despite his best attempts and glances out the window, over Mac's shoulder. Dee and the rest are long gone.

"Yeah."

"Well..." Mac looks like he's about to ask something, maybe a little mean, maybe nowhere near mean enough, but simply says, "Okay."

Nodding once, Dennis swallows around the lump of emotion or whatever in his throat.

"Okay," he echoes, and then, might as well, before he can think about it, he jerks his hand out and awkwardly puts it on Mac's. The air locked in the car with them has warmed with their breath, but Mac's hands are cool and softer than Dennis ever remembered. It almost shocks him into pulling back, but he ignores every instinct telling him to stop crossing his own lines and keeps his hand where it is on Mac's on his knee.

The car fills with silence for a moment after that. Dennis can feel Mac's eyes on him, and it's fine (better than fine) but...

Dennis is afraid. In the small confines of the car and the silence, with only Mac around, he'll admit that to himself. Not out loud, never out loud (probably), but for a second he can acknowledge a little weakness. He can look Mac in the eye and flinch a little because it's like looking at the sun, facing the wind with your eyes wide open, but then he can _keep_ looking because Mac is looking back.

They're still looking at each other when Dennis's fingers intertwine down with Mac's. Dennis doesn't realize it until it's already happened, and when he does he reflexively squeezes his fingers, but then Mac squeezes back, and—

Maybe it wasn't what he meant to do, but it wasn't bad.

So, when Dennis pulls his hand back to turn on the car and his mix CD picks up where it left off, he looks back at Mac for a second and thinks to himself, _maybe some rules can change_.

**Author's Note:**

> okay, so, disclaimer: i've seen the episode once, when it came out, but haven't stopping thinking abt it since. i just wanna say ofc there's a difference between having empathy and being an apologist, and i tried to stay on this side of the line. megan ganz is a great writer and i admire how she balances showing new sides and new topics while maintaining a grasp on the characters. she's amazing. i love her. anyway,
> 
> i just COULD NOT get "the gang tends bar" out of my head, bc emotionally-vulnerable-and-receptive dennis and this-ep dennis should be totally at odds, but it fits so perfectly with his shown distinction between sex and feelings ("ptsdee", the d.e.n.n.i.s.-ing) and occasional idiocy wrt how mac actually cares about him (dennis jr, the imaginary dinner party) and at this point it feels like they only deserve each other and i'll stop now but y'know. had to write this. cool.
> 
> let me know your thoughts! on this or the ep or anything i've said here, which is, uh, a lot. i'll be back to do some edits later, i just had to get it out of my system so i could focus on uni. (but really please comment! this is the second time i've written macdennis and i wanna know if it sounds like them enough)
> 
> title from "[make out in my car (sufjan version)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5vT6l-NDF4)" by moses sumney & sufjan stevens. is it ironically self-serious? or is it that i was working on this when the song came on shuffle and almost screamed? you decide (it's both)
> 
> (and quick thanks to the friend who has asked to remain nameless but whose help/expertise about bpd was still greatly appreciated.)
> 
> tumblr @[lamphous](http://lamphous.tumblr.com) and @[sensitiveintellectualtype](http://sensitiveintellectualtype.tumblr.com) (sunny sideblog)


End file.
